If this Civil War shrine is Oz for wayfarers on the Appalachian Trail, and it is, then Jean Cashin must be Glenda.
As hikers charge across the northern Virginia ridges to the site of John Brown’s short-lived slave revolt, they find a town that seems to defy gravity, clinging to the steep hillsides where the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers rush to meet.
More Top Picks Best Wheeled Coolers
They also meet Cashin. Like Oz’s good witch of the north, she provides the advice and help hikers seek. She has been at the Appalachian Trail Conference, which coordinates trail maintenance and provides information, for 23 years.
It has been a ritual for through-hikers to have the now 65-year-old grandmother snap their pictures in front of the two-story, white stucco conference headquarters.
Back inside, she asks how their hike is going. They respond with a thumbs up.
“That’s the glory of being here for so long,” she says. “The reward of the job is talking to people who are so happy.”
“She’s the Earth Mother of the trail,” said Karen Lutz, the ATC’s mid-Atlantic regional representative. “She can make it seem like your question is the first she’s ever had about a certain trail subject even though she’s heard it and answered it 6,000 times before.”
As good as she is juggling phones, Cashin seems to relish the walk-in traffic more, even when she can smell it a block or two away.
“Friday we had a lot of through-hikers come in and it smelled like a zoo in here.” She keeps a spray can of Lysol at her feet under the desk.
Cashin’s best advice is “Be prepared. It’s not a cup of tea out there. It’s often painful. It hurts. You know that already and you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait until you get to the rocks in Pennsylvania.”
The week on the trail leading into Harpers Ferry was no yellow brick road. On one 18-mile day from Sky Meadows State Park to the hostel on Bears Den Mountain, the trail seesawed in and out of a succession of hollows and ridges, forcing Robin (Romback, a photographer) and me to climb close to 5,000 vertical feet.
And spring has run out on us. Summer has caught up. A honeysuckle fog plays in our noses, but only the white flowers of the mountain laurel on higher ridges and pink primrose break up the deep green of the woods. Stinging nettles, poison ivy and briars crowd along many sections of the trail.
In the 53 miles that we made in a week, we came upon the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club’s Jim and Molly Denton Shelter, just outside of Front Royal, Va.
The Denton Shelter is dubbed the “Hiker’s Hilton.” Judging by hiker comments in the shelter register, it’s the best that north-bounders have seen. Named for the Dentons, who met in 1942 as members of the Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club, the shelter has a separate cooking pavilion, barbecue pit, spring-fed shower (brrr!), deck and Adirondack-style bench chairs.
Robin and I also spent a night at the Bears Den Hostel at the summit of Bears Den Mountain. The Norman-style castle was built of locally quarried quartzite by a Washington doctor for his opera singer wife in 1933.
The biggest adventure of the week came on a side trail to Buzzard Rocks. We had heard about dens of rattlesnakes.
Led by Lightning Hopkins – Robert Mack, 24, of Knoxville, Tenn., our hiking companion for the last part of the week – we ventured onto the jumble of rocks. True to his name, Lightning Hopkins was 20 yards out into the granite and quartzite.
Then I said, “Here’s some,” pointing to a crevice 10 feet ahead of me that Hopkins had jumped over.
When they began to writhe in all directions at once and a rattle and two heads appeared, we beat a hasty retreat.
“What a rush man!” Lightning Hopkins said as we hiked on. “If we had this adrenalin to hike on all day, we’d be in Harpers Ferry this afternoon.”